Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6125747" data-attributes="member: 1465">This is a very good observation, and a well-chosen example.In lieu of my previous post, "assassin" could be a job and therefore be well represented by a background. As such it would probably involve poison use as you say, but perhaps more the type of poison that is applied to food/drink or objects as a trap for the victim, with possibly some fringe requirements related to sneaking, disguise, concealing objects etc to deliver the poison, rather than the type of poison applied to weapons. It doesn't have to be entirely limited to poisons, but as long as it is restricted to downtime benefits, it would match all other backgrounds. This because an assassin's "job" is not really about being paid to wage into a battle or a duel... it's just about eliminating a specific target so that your customer doesn't have to do it himself, and an assassin's interest is also not getting caught.But "assassin" could also be more like a slayer-type (such as the Assassin character in Diablo II), and poison use in this case would be related to coating bladed weapons to deal more damage quickly. That's clearly a combat strategy, and this type of benefit would not fit in the current mechanics & concept of a background. It would fit much better to either a (sub)class feature or to non-class features (i.e. feats). IMHO both of them could be designed and work well, but (a) feats (and eventually a specialty) would be the best to represent simply poison use in combat, which is a tactic or strategy that could be easily ported to any character whether a Fighter, Rogue, Blackguard, Ranger... at which point let's just make it feats available to anybody interested; (b) a whole class or subclass can hardly hold on poison use in combat only, so it would probably hold much better on its own if the archetype included more assassination-based technique than just poison use, and some support abilities as well. There could be for example a Rogue's Assassin scheme, but why not also a Monk's Ninja monastic tradition?</blockquote>

Verification